A Kernel of Truth

We are the compute power that runs the universe.

You heard that right. The answer to the age-old question "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound" is a resounding NO. The tree all but ceases to exist.

I'm not talking like the brain development of a child. I'm talking about a client server model where we're both the client and the server. Our observing an object is the very thing that processes and updates the data. When we look away, the object is serialized.

The data doesn't go away. The entity, the instance of That Thing you looked at still exists. Somewhere. In some database. We don't really know where it goes.

But its data is static and un-changing until another processing unit, another one of us, observes it again. Once you look, the Reality Engine embedded beneath your Default Mode Network takes the current Universal Context on which your subjective experience is mounted, deserializes the entity or entities you're observing, and starts streaming them through.

The processed data is synchronized between all observers using some mechanism we still don't totally understand. But what we do know about that sync mechanism is that it's error prone. Like a blockchain, updates to the entity's state are co-processed across all observers REs, and pushed back to a public ledger of What Actually Happened. But if my RE has a bug or error, it might push something onto the eldger that disagrees with that of another observer.

And I'm not talking about disagreements in our subjective experiences. Again, that's all buit on top of the core RE processing. Your subjective experience is a whole other network that takes What Actually Happened and re-processes it through the rest of your brain – the parts we're used to talking about. The RE is a layer beneath it.

So what happens when the WAH ledger gets a disagreement? Well, what we have observed appears to indicate that it's some kind of consensus resolution system, where it weights all proposed updates by the number of observers who got that result. Then it merges them to create a new entry to the WAH ledger.

See a problem there? That means that the new entry necessarily isn't correct. Even if one of the proposed updates was correct, it was merged with other updates that weren't.

Let me put this another way: when there are a lot of observers of some entity being processed, reality starts to produce errors at an approximately-logarithmic proportion to the number of observers. The only plus side to this is that those errors are all agreed upon, so our RE cores can continue processing the entities on the same objective reality, and our subjective experiences can continue to be processed based on an agreed-upon WAH ledger.

Which means your subjective experience and mine are at least based on the same reality, even if it's error prone.

So, you might ask: what happens if you're alone and observing an entity?

Yes, you guessed it: you have complete control over the processing of the entity. You have exclusive access to pushing updates to the WAH ledger and, effectively, the progression of reality for that given entity. Or, at least, your RE does.

Once we found that out, of course we've been working on accessing the RE so that we can take advantage of that fact. But it doesn't seem to work. The RE operates a bit like a cryptokernel on any computer chip, as far as tamper-prevention mechanisms go. We've tried surgically tampering with the human connectome in a few cases, but in all of those cases the patients immediately died. No heart failure, no bloody vomit or anything crazy. But the brain shut off instantly and refused to turn back on, as if some security fuse blew and broke the whole system. We also tried using drugs, and got one of two results: either the patient shut off instantly, or the patient was rewired in a way we didn't expect or intend. This sometimes just gave the patient a psychadelic experience, and sometimes left them permanently damaged. One guy's Subjective Processing Unit seemed to go haywire instead of connecting to the underlying RE, and he jumped out of the window like a shroomer in Amsterdam.

That's why you're significant. Your connectome has a unique architecture, and the RE actually appears to have exposed lead wires. We're hoping to connect to those directly. Don't worry, we won't connect them to other parts of your brain. Like I said, we tried that and it didn't work. Nope, we're going to connect them directly to The Core. Our hope is that once we connect it to a mainframe system we own, that we can probe the leads and see what they do. We of course will be careful not to trip any of the tamper-proofing mechanisms. After diligent review our our past surgical attempts, we think we have a comprehensive list of what might trigger a shutdown. We absolutely will not attempt to send a signal into your RE, even if we connect and even if we get really promising results. We'll disconnect you from The Core, wake you back up, and analyze results exhaustively, before any next moves. So you'll have a chance to consent (or not) as to whether we can reconnect and try something new.

Yes, good question. In the event that we believe disconnection would cause a shutdown, we will attempt to wake you up without disconnecting you from The Core. That could be a bit uncomfortable, since you'd have to stay in the operating room, but at least we could consult with you about what you want to do. We'd be able to share our preliminary findings as well. There is a chance your volunteering for this surgery can help us find out where the entity data is stored and, if we're lucky, even access it. That's right, we might be able to change any reality that you exclusively are observing, and add entities to the universe database that don't yet exist. You would basically enable us to do what so many people pray to God to do: cure diseases, solve world hunger, and bring peace to the world.

So, do you consent?